


Gazal

by Murasaki99



Category: The Rat Patrol
Genre: Gen, Gift Work, Hiking, Humor, Nature, Painting, Sketching, Western Desert Campaign, World War II, almost a vacation, artwork, mad rock scramble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:47:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29192538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Murasaki99/pseuds/Murasaki99
Summary: Corporal Arnheiter, Hauptmann Dietrich's company clerk, and his best friend Konrad Genscher are taking a little well-earned break from the grind of the Western Desert Campaign.  They've been camping away from the main bulk of Dietrich's company to enjoy the natural environment.  Arnheiter sketches and paints, they play cards, all is calm and relaxing.  Until they are spotted by the Rat Patrol and matters get a bit more exciting than they had planned.This is a gift- and tribute-fic for RKMacBride and solely inspired by her works.  Mad props to RK for her comments and editorial suggestions, without which this story would never have come to fruition.Vielen Danke!See the notes for more and links to the parent stories.  🌴
Comments: 25
Kudos: 20





	Gazal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RKMacBride](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RKMacBride/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Quality of Mercy Raid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10401099) by [RKMacBride](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RKMacBride/pseuds/RKMacBride). 



> This gift-fic came into being because some original characters are so memorable they spark the imagination. The story is completely inspired by, and follows the [Rats and Foxes](https://archiveofourown.org/series/663959) and [Into the Wide World](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1117809) series of stories created by RKMacBride. While you **can** read this fic by itself, you will not get full enjoyment from it unless you at least read The Quality of Mercy Raid, which sets up all the events in this story. I first encountered Fritz Arnheiter in that tale, along with his friend Konrad Genscher, and the rest of Hauptmann Dietrich’s merry crew, and was completely captivated by how everyone felt so real and like they simply had always been part of the original story. 
> 
> If you wish to enjoy the stories referenced in their proper chronological order and not start in the middle like I did, they are:  
> • [Sand Dunes and Palm Trees](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15814830)  
> • [The Pass of Thermopylae Raid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17369537/chapters/40873343)  
> • [The Quality of Mercy Raid](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10401099)
> 
> And a big "Thank you!" as well to [dracsmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracsmith/pseuds/dracsmith), for early commentary, edits, and encouragement. It takes a village to get things done... or perhaps a team of people in jeeps. 😂

Corporal Friedrich Arnheiter sat cross-legged on a large rock, his sketchbook balanced on a knee, roughing out the shape of the graceful creature before him with sure strokes of his pencil. The animal was a desert gazelle, formed much like a deer, only very small compared to the red deer of his native Thuringia. It stood not quite hip-high, about 60 cm in height at the shoulders, with long legs made for running and leaping. A beautiful face and large eyes framed by long eyelashes made it an artist’s dream subject. The little buck’s head was topped with a set of slender, slightly twisted and curved horns. He was nibbling busily at the shrubs that clung to the steep slopes of the rugged up-thrust plateau that formed the back of the little temporary camp he was sharing with his tent mate and best friend Konrad Genscher. 

Arnheiter was recovering from an ordeal shared with his Captain[1], and was under strict orders not to do anything too strenuous after getting a concussion. But the mandated rest time was almost up, his headaches were gone, and with his eyes working properly again, he had obtained permission from Hauptmann Dietrich to set up his tent somewhat apart from the main camp to sketch the shy desert wildlife that only emerged in the early morning or evening. He and Konrad had pitched their tent around a knee of the large escarpment, shielding them from the noise of their main camp. He’d been overjoyed to find the little gazelle picking its dainty path around the hill in the late afternoon, looking for tender vegetation. While it was not at all tame, it did not seem to mind his company. 

Konrad had joined him after the day’s work, sitting quietly on another rock nearby in the growing shade cast by the steep plateau, alternating between reading a book and watching his friend sketch. 

A series of sharp clanking noises coming from their tent some distance away made both Germans and gazelle raise their heads.

“Say, that’s your tin-can bells,” said Genscher.

Arnheiter had worked out that form of simple alarm after some very unpleasant experiences in the past[2] and while they were superfluous in the relative safety of their camp, he had put them back on the door flaps of their tent while they were out here more or less alone.

“Yes, but who is in our tent?” Arnheiter stood up and looked toward their camp. The local natives might decide to pillage their gear, but Dietrich nearly always placed their camps well off the road and away from trade trails so as not to attract undue attention. Robbery was rarely a problem. 

To Arnheiter’s surprise, Private Hitchcock of the Rat Patrol flung open the back flap of the tent. 

The American’s red French _kepi_ was distinctive – not two weeks past, Hitch, along with the rest of the Rat Patrol, had helped to save his life and that of his Captain when they had been injured and lost in the desert[3]. 

“ _Die Rattentruppe_?” said Genscher, staring in astonishment. “What are they doing here?”

“I do not know… I suspect we do not want to know,” said Arnheiter. A moment after the Germans had spotted Hitch, the American noticed them in turn. 

“Sarge! I see Fritz, Dietrich’s clerk!”

“Where?” Came the voice of Sergeant Sam Troy. The American burst from the front of the tent, rattling the cans again, and scanning the area. 

“They are saying your name. That is not good,” said Genscher, wide-eyed with horror. He did not speak English, but he had heard his friend’s name clearly. “They know it is your tent and they must want something you may have– or you!” 

The only English word Arnheiter understood was “O.K.”, and he knew from relatively recent experience that neither Troy nor Hitch spoke much German. The one _Unteroffizier_ who did speak German was nowhere in sight. Requesting a parley was pointless. Probably also very hazardous.

While both men were armed with pistols, they were not front line soldiers. Neither of them had a taste for jumping into combat against a team who tended to be seriously fatal when encountered. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Arnheiter saw the gazelle he’d been sketching spring lightly away up the rocky face of the escarpment. At once, he turned Genscher around.

“Follow the gazelle, quickly!”

The two men bounded up the wall formed by the anticline that had thrust up from the Earth’s mantle ages ago to form a plateau. It was nearly sheer, definitely too steep to climb without ropes and pitons, and yet the little gazelle found footholds where the rock had fractured over the eons. These formed tiny, irregular steps that would have been invisible to the men had not the animal used them but seconds earlier. Fritz pulled his friend along to follow in the gazelle’s wake. 

Troy watched in amazement as Arnheiter and his buddy ran up the cliff face like a pair of nimble mountain goats clad in Afrika Korps khaki. 

“Where’d they learn to do _that_?” Hitch shook his head. 

“I can’t believe we just got away!” Genscher gasped as they made the last jump upward and sprinted over the shoulder of the hill, out of pistol-shot. “Why are they after you?” he added. “Who told them about you?”

“Since we have no truce right now, and we do not have _Herr Hauptmann_ to speak to them in English, I am not going to ask them!” said Arnheiter. 

The lack of a truce lent urgency to the situation. The gazelle was still in sight. Having escaped the Americans, the buck proceeded to move further up the levels of the escarpment at an easier pace. Arnheiter followed him, careful to mark where the animal placed his hooves. Being an experienced mountain _Wandersmann_ had its advantages. The ancient weathered rock was friable. A slip might send them rolling off the edge of the plateau, and it was at least a twenty meter drop down to the desert floor. Pausing for a moment to listen, he did not hear immediate pursuit on the route they had just covered, but that did not mean the Rat Patrol had given up.

“We need to get back to the main camp,” said Genscher, in between cautious steps. “Warn everyone.”

“Yes.” 

Arnheiter looked at the westering sun and then at their four-legged guide, who was continuing his steady course ahead of them. 

“Let’s keep following the little one here; he knows how to move over these broken hills safely. We will need to circle around and return to the camp from the north, rather than go by the southern route where we had our tent. Where there are two of the _Rattentruppe_ , the other two will be nearby. We must keep moving.”

“Our tent!” Genscher groaned. 

“You didn’t have anything important in it, did you?”

“My deck of cards!”

Arnheiter chuckled at that. 

“I’ll buy you a new one if I have to,” he said. “But I suspect they don’t want them. I left my paints and sketches; I do not want to lose them, either. I hope we’ll be able to recover the tent later. With a proper escort.”

“A large escort,” added Genscher fervently.

\---***---

“Hi, Sarge,” said Tully as he jogged up to the tent several minutes later. “Did they run Moffitt’s way?”

“Nah, those guys must’ve been taking lessons from Dietrich. Rather than make a break for it by the two escape routes we covered, once we flushed them out, they made a third.” Troy pointed up at the hillside. “An’ here I thought we had all the luck today, spotting their camp on our way back to HQ.”

Tully smiled at Troy as he caught his breath.

“The kids have got guts.”

“That IS a lot of Dietrich’s influence, I’m afraid,” said Moffitt, joining them in time to hear some of the conversation. “No luck, Troy?”

“Nope, they got away clean.”

“Since Fritz is Dietrich’s company clerk, did you find any maps, messages from their command, or notes for me to examine?” asked Moffitt, nodding at the tent.

“Not in this one,” said Troy. “I did a quick check, and all I found were sketches of the wildlife and landscapes around here. Dietrich was right, Fritz does have a good eye for detail and a lot of talent.” He held up a watercolor sketch of a jerboa and grinned. 

“I kind’a like this one best.”

\---***---

“Did they take anything?” asked Dietrich. He scanned the area with his field glasses, but the Rat Patrol was long gone, the only evidence of their presence being some fresh jeep tracks in a bit of loose sand.

“No sir,” said Genscher, as he helped Arnheiter strike and pack the tent. “They did not add extras like a transmitter, either.” 

They had been burned by that technique before and now were doubly-cautious[4]. The large escort Genscher had wished for waited outside, lessening his worries that the Rat Patrol would leap out of some hiding place while they were occupied with gathering their gear. 

After Arnheiter and Genscher had returned to the company camp and reported their adventure, the Captain had decided it would be safer to move everyone to a different location, preferably a site that Sergeant Troy and his friends knew nothing about. Quickly striking the camp, the company had looped around to salvage what they could from his men’s abandoned tent. To their surprise, the tent was still standing, and was relatively undisturbed beyond the clutter created by Sergeant Troy’s search of the interior.

“Something **is** missing,” said Arnheiter, looking at his stack of gathered sketches with a puzzled frown. “The little jumping-mouse I painted is gone, and this has been added.” He held up a five dollar bill.

“American dollars for a sketch of a jerboa?” Dietrich smiled strangely. “You have acquired a patron, Arnheiter.”

“I’m not sure I’m flattered, _Herr Hauptmann_ ,” he replied. His good-natured face was thoughtful. “They did not come all the way here to shop for a painting to hang on their wall, er, tent.”

“The American – Sergeant Troy – called Fritz’s name. I suspect they hoped Arnheiter had something useful, plans, maps, or messages perhaps?” said Genscher.

“Maps? Messages?” Dietrich scowled as he considered that tidbit of deduction. “But how would he…?” His eyes widened, and a little color crept into his face under the tan. 

“ _Mein Herr_?” Arnheiter noticed his Captain’s hesitation.

“That… is my fault,” Dietrich admitted. 

“Sir? How could that be?” asked Arnheiter. He knew Troy and his friends had seen him sketch and paint while he and the Captain were in their custody, but his talent for making images of anything he had seen, from memory, had been a closely-kept secret, mostly to keep him out of the clutches of the _Abwehr_ , or military intelligence. 

Dietrich sighed, his mouth turned down in a frown of self-recrimination.

“I spoke to Sergeant Troy, while we were recovering in their care. I told him of your artistic talent, which would have been perfectly fine had I stopped with that, but I spoke of your recreating from memory the map Troy had stolen. I also told him you are our company clerk, which means you receive all our communications from Command.”

“Oh? _Oh_. In English, _Herr Hauptman_? I would not have noticed.”

“Exactly. I should have thought it through and informed you later. At the time we were their prisoners, and I thought it would cause no harm to tell the Sergeant.”

Now that he understood where the Rat Patrol’s information had come from, and that it was not some sort of magic, Arnheiter felt much less worried. He was more concerned over his Captain’s unhappiness over his lapse of judgement than of being in personal danger. 

“You were recovering from heat stroke, _Mein Herr_ ,” Arnheiter offered. “None of us were in perfect health.” Which was a major understatement.

“I still should have been more cautious in my speech,” said Dietrich. His face took on a stubborn expression. “Well, what is done is done. We shall simply have to be cautious.” He smiled at Arnheiter suddenly, a little half-grin that meant he found the situation amusing. “I am sorry, but you belong with us, and I will object most strenuously if they try to carry you away.”

“ _I’ll_ object for certain! I belong here.” Arnheiter looked as stubborn as his commanding officer. 

“How did you manage to get away from them?” Dietrich knew both Arnheiter and Genscher were resourceful men, but for them to evade the entire Rat Patrol seemed like a major miracle. 

“There was a little gazelle near our camp. I was sketching it when we realized Sergeant Troy and Private Hitchcock were in our tent. The gazelle ran up the face of this hill and we followed in its footsteps. It led us all the way up safely, and then over to the northern scarp of the plateau so we could rejoin you.” He pointed at the rugged stone wall of the massif. 

“Looking at it now, I could not repeat the climb; it was only because we could follow the gazelle that we were able to escape,” said Arnheiter. 

The Captain examined the stone of the escarpment and shook his head. Arnheiter was correct, there was no visible path up the apparently sheer rock face. 

The packed tent loaded, and the signs of his men’s little camp erased, he climbed into the _Kübel_ wagen and spoke as Arnheiter took the wheel.

“We owe your little _ġazāl_ a debt of gratitude,” Dietrich said as they got the company column under way.

“ _Ġazāl, Mein Herr_?” asked Arnheiter as he carefully eased the _Kübel_ _wagen_ over the rough path. 

“The native term for the desert gazelle,” Dietrich replied. “ _Die Rattentruppe_ may have taken the jerboa as their mascot, but I like yours better.”

“May I paint one on the _Kübel_ _wagen_?” Arnheiter smiled as he posed the question. 

Dietrich laughed at the thought. “It might make a better company banner rather than adorning our shopworn vehicles.”

“We could do that!” Genscher spoke from the rear seat. “We have paint, all we would need is some canvas scrap and a bit of hand-sewing.”

“We should have heavy canvas needles for tent repair somewhere,” said Arnheiter. “I’ll check our supply listings after we make our new camp.”

Dietrich realized his horses, or rather, gazelles, had fled the barn. Deciding it was best to give in gracefully, he said.

“No rude designs, gentlemen.” 

“Oh no, _Mein Herr_! It will be very elegant,” said Arnheiter, grinning from ear to ear.

\---***---

A week later the new banner was flying proudly from their radio aerial as they bounced down the coast road with the company arrayed behind them. It featured a leaping gazelle in white on a red background. 

“Well done,” said Dietrich. Standing up in the vehicle, he scanned the horizon for the telltale signs of the Allies in general and the Rat Patrol in particular. So far, so good. 

“The gazelle looks as if it is moving when the banner ripples in the wind.” The effect was quite striking. 

“Thank you, _Mein Herr_ ,” said Arnheiter. “I saw something like it in a book about the Battle of Hastings, and Max agreed it would make a good design.”

“The gazelle seems to be jumping over a small lumpy rock?” asked Dietrich. The banner was fluttering briskly enough it was difficult to make out the complete shape of the object. For an instant the breeze held the banner out completely straight. His eyes widened and then narrowed.

“Is our gazelle leaping over a _jerboa_?”

“It is, _mein Herr_ ,” replied Arnheiter. His expression was completely innocent. “Max suggested it, and I thought it a good idea.”

“Since it is jumping, it is logical that it should be jumping over _something_ ,” said Genscher, managing to sound as innocent as Arnheiter looked.

“Hmf, yes, logical,” said Dietrich, not quite managing to smother the laugh the image provoked. 

###

[1] See _The Quality of Mercy Raid_ : <https://archiveofourown.org/works/10401099>

[2] See _Sand Dunes and Palm Trees_ : 

[3] Also in _The Quality of Mercy Raid_.

[4] See The Pass of Thermopylae Raid: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17369537/chapters/40873343


End file.
